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FILM; The House Is Dark, and the Children Are Afraid

By ANTHONY MINGHELLA

Published: August 12, 2001

HERE is my recurring dream. It takes many narrative forms, but always with the same circumstances. A cottage, once belonging to me, has fallen into neglect. In the dream I suffer intense guilt at having allowed this once pleasant property to deteriorate beyond rescue; fungus blossoms on the walls, the furniture rots, my house-proud neighbors are suitably disgusted. In the anguish of the dream I cannot account for having forgotten this house, forgotten that I am responsible for its maintenance. Abject, I investigate its dereliction, wandering through damp and fetid corridors. On waking I have to debrief myself. The house, in reality, ceased to belong to me several years ago. Actually, it has been demolished. And yet I can carry the shame with me well into the day.

I was disconcerted, then, to learn that some therapeutic disciplines encourage children in their care to draw houses, because in so doing they will describe their own psyches: in drawing a house, they are effectively drawing themselves.

So I can only guess at what this tells us about the dream-life of the Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, whose film ''The Others'' opened on Friday. Profoundly isolated, with every room locked and kept in darkness, the house he has drawn as his movie's sole location provides the most disconcerting accommodation since Jack Nicholson and family moved into the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's ''The Shining.'' But it is to a more obvious influence -- Alfred Hitchcock -- that ''The Others'' is most clearly in debt. The iron gates and suffocating fog remind us of another dreamily forbidding property, that of Manderley in Hitchcock's 1940 film ''Rebecca.''

Mr. Amenábar's house comes complete with its very own Mrs. Danvers in the shape of Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), and in Grace (Nicole Kidman) we watch another young heroine suffocating under the weight of a house's unconscionable history. Living on Jersey in the Channel Islands during the last days of World War II, Grace is mother to two mysteriously damaged children, defending them against the external threat of German occupation and from the attritional forces at work within the house, the unseen ''intruders.''

''The Others'' is the 29-year-old Mr. Amenábar's third film as writer, director and composer and represents a striking advance from the sophomore ''Open Your Eyes'' (1997). An intermittently dazzling but brittle psychological thriller about a rich and handsome man disfigured in a car crash, ''Open Your Eyes'' was recently filmed in an American incarnation by Cameron Crowe as ''Vanilla Sky,'' starring Tom Cruise (for a December release). The percipient Mr. Cruise also serves as executive producer on ''The Others'' and is credited as having championed what is Mr. Amenabar's first English-language project. ''The Others'' is a movie that terrifies an audience, not because of what happens but because of what has happened; and it stands as a pungent antidote to the slash and tickle teenage horror movies more commonly associated with its distributor, Dimension Films.

It strikes me as remarkable that there is a genre in entertainment whose expressed aim is to frighten its audience and whose success might be measured explicitly in terms of its ability to excite an emotion we generally associate with unpleasantness or revulsion. All horror films aspire to the scream. They are best and safest experienced collectively, with an almost compulsory release of laughter following each shriek of dread. It is fear filleted of pain, of course, and vicariously felt: the contemplation of the vampire's kiss without the teeth in one's own neck.

The pleasures of ''The Others'' are less masochistic. No psychotic killers stalk this house, and the film has a genuine integrity, earning its shivers from conjuring primal anxieties -- fear of the dark, fear of abandonment, fear of the dead. Mr. Amenábar explained to me by telephone recently that he had conceived of the plot of ''Open Your Eyes'' while bedridden with flu. ''The Others'' might also have come from a feverish dream. Nobody in the film appears to walk at a normal pace, as if the air thickens and thins around each character, and -- in the house's crushing grip -- mother and children appear bloodless, suffocated. Naturalism plays little part in any of the performances, because the film is interested not in the waking life but in the dream life -- and in the collective dreaming of the audience, sitting in the dark, mesmerized. Buñuel spoke of the cinema as a form of human expression most closely resembling the work of the mind during sleep. ''Film seems to be an involuntary imitation of dream,'' he said. ''The darkness that gradually invades the auditorium is the equivalent of closing our eyes.''

With ''The Others,'' Mr. Amenábar creates a world where all the characters appear to be sleepwalking, as if at any moment they might open their eyes.

ACCORDINGLY, the movie starts, with great authority, on a close shot of Grace waking from a nightmare, her face contorted in a rictus scream, echoing Edvard Munch. This is an intensely neurotic work, fetishizing Grace's obsession with locking and unlocking doors, her increasingly desperate attempts to control the house as it continues to control her. Ms. Kidman's wrenching performance, all porcelain and paranoia, strands of sanity stretched to the breaking point, is to this movie what Mr. Nicholson was to ''The Shining,'' what Catherine Deneuve was to ''Repulsion.'' Notwithstanding some marvelous work from the supporting cast, this is essentially a monodrama, and Ms. Kidman's gradual fragmentation is heartbreaking.

Anthony Minghella was nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays of ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' and ''The English Patient,'' for which he won an Oscar as director. His next film will be his adaptation of ''Cold Mountain,'' by Charles Frazier.